Anchorage artist Sami Ali opened the Homer Council on the Arts first Friday show, “The Death of Retail,” on Sept. 6. The mixed media art show explores the demise of retail stores in America and how that has impacted what people do with their time and where they go instead.

“Is it good or bad that shopping opportunities have evolved the way they have?” she asked. She noted specifically the role of Amazon, the convenience of online shopping — even for groceries — and the role of large box stores like Target, Walmart, Costco and Fred Meyer. Ali said she personally has tried to avoid shopping at stores like these when she can “but it’s just too easy and too affordable sometimes, and if you’re always looking for the best deal, that’s where you’ll find it.”

Conditions under the COVID pandemic also contributed to this because of the lack of ability to go out and shop and the closure of some stores. “It took the situation to a new level and now it’s just so convenient and affordable to have something delivered that a lot of mom-and-pop retail stores just can’t survive,” she said. The pandemic also so a transition to more people working from home and less engagement with restaurant meals during the work day.

In her introduction to the art catalogue, she wrote “it hit me like a slap in the face when the Nordstroms closed in Anchorage. That store was one of the reasons I moved here from Fairbanks 20 years ago.”

Professionally, Ali works as a full-time emergency room doctor at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. She is a Vietnamese immigrant whose family immigrated to the United States in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. “My family was evacuated off the U.S. embassy rooftop as part of the helicopter evacuation,” she said. Because of her position as a member of an immigrant household, she said she was always required to use and excel in science and math and pursue an academic career, although she has always considered herself to be creative.

When she originally came to the U.S., her family lived on the Gulf Coast and she grew up in Alabama and Texas. Ali attended college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and moved to Alaska 20 years ago, originally attempting school in Fairbanks, but said that region of the state was too dark and cold. She moved back to Texas but when a position opened at Providence in Anchorage, she decided to try that and moved back to Alaska about 18 years ago.

Despite an intense academic background, Ali said she has always been creative, dabbling with things like book binding, cake decorating and stained glass. “In 2020, I committed to a daily art practice, and that’s kind of where things took off.”

Her painting practice is palette knife oil paintings and several of these are included in the show: a painting of the Alyeska mountain in Girdwood; one titled “Roses for Sale”; and piece titled “Baron” showing an empty parking lot at the Anchorage Fifth Avenue Mall. She has participated in several painting competitions over the past few years.

She defines her painting style as plein air, meaning she paints from what she sees on-site, not from a photo. For example, for the Alyeska painting, she stood by the highway at the base of the mountain and painted for two hours in order to see how the light and environment changed the features of the image over time.

“The benefit of plein air painting is that you capture natural and accurate light and shadow colors, which is very tricky because the light is always changing. Clouds are moving in, the wind is blowing, you know there are many conditions to account for and you can only do it for a couple hours before the light changes too much or it will be a totally different picture from when you started,” she said.

In October of 2023, she won a community plein air painting competition in Sedona, Arizona.

“I love whimsical things and colorful things, and so I started committing to sort of getting more involved in my art. Now that I’m sort of at the end of my medical career and looking forward to retirement in a few years, I’m exploring more of what would I do in my retirement,” she said.

Ali describes herself as the type of person who fully commits to something once she decides to try it. She provides the example that in 2010 she started to learn calligraphy and she soon started a calligraphy business making custom maps and wedding invitations. “When I want to try something, I just go all into it, and that’s how my art practice is turning out now,” she said.

Ali said much of her inspiration comes from the ocean, colorful flowers and colors and textures in general. Aside from Alaska, one of the place she has gathered some of that is from the islands of Hawaii.

Just before “The Death of Retail,” Ali had a show in Fairbanks at the Bear Gallery. “That show was all oil painting palette knife flowers,” she said.

She said she knew she wanted the Homer show to be something different and more diverse and she knew one of the features of retail is the role of “shiny and flashy things that you can’t show with oil paint,” she said. She decided that she wanted to include features of beads, textiles and rhinestones.

One of her favorite pieces in the show is the Amazon monster titled, “What’s Happening.” It depicts a dragon created from Amazon boxes and labels attacking other smaller scale retail stores such as Patagonia, Kohl’s, REI, IKEA, the Home Depot and Williams Sonoma, some of which are large in their own context.

When Ali created the show, she put together the “death” component first to show the gloomy components about the decline of retail, “all that’s really left is food, liquor and marijuana dispensary stores.” She noted that the only other stores available in Anchorage are based on hobbies — naming businesses such as Michaels, REI and JOANN Fabric. Anything new that opens is likely to be another liquor store or dispensary, she said.

In order to balance the dark component of the show, she added a bright mixed media “decorated cake” section to the show including. The base of the cakes was made with acrylic and plastic foam. They were painted and then decorated in various styles. “To me, the cakes represent the retail component of fast food and all the restaurants that remain.”

Another component of the show are the flashy first paintings in a section called “The Best Days.” Ali’s program description describes her memories of the best days of retail from the 1980s and ‘90s when the malls were a social place for teenagers to spend time with friends. They were “not just a place to buy gifts, the mall was for hanging out,” the art catalogue states.

On the general topic related to the death of retail, Ali said some of the smaller communities in Alaska haven’t really been impacted with the same effects experienced in larger cities. She also noted Homer’s share of art gallery businesses as still relatively popular in the community. She also said that Alaska retail has the shelter of shipping delays unlike larger cities in the contiguous United States where “if you order something by 11 a.m. you can have it delivered by 5 p.m. And in some larger cities that’s more convenient than going to a grocery store.”

“The Death of Retail” has taken Ali 10 months to create. The opening in Homer is the first showing. Ali hopes that she’ll be able to present it again somewhere else but doesn’t have plans to yet.

Brochures with more information about each of the pieces in the show and artist statement and biography are available at Homer Council on the Arts and Sami Ali will be returning to Homer to provide an artist’s talk on Sept. 23 at 6 p.m.

Sami Ali stands next to her mixed media art “Meet me in Dresses,” “Browsing,” and “I Needed Them” featured in the exhibit “The Art of Retail” on display at Homer Council on the Arts through September 2024. The three pieces are part of the section show titled “The Best Days.” (Emilie Springer/ Homer News)